RaveKenyon ReviewDebut author Claire Boyles’s new collection Site Fidelity includes ten stories that come, deeply, from place. Boyles’s places strike me not so much as architectural—though they do serve structural purposes within the fictions—but as abundant natural resources that Boyles lovingly mines. Her settings exist as characters in their own right, carefully detailed, possessed of complex backstories, and imbued with definite, sometimes dangerous, agency ... In some cases, place provides not plot but rich detail—raw material that Boyles uses to create her characters’ layered interior landscapes ... Boyles seems to prefer the more naturalistic impression of an unresolved ending, but sometimes the avoidance of resolution can feel a little like a dodge. But that may be a novelist’s complaint, one that masks underlying praise: I wanted to stick with these vivid characters and settings all the way, to live through their problems until justice was done or comfort found ... Site Fidelity pines for its lands, too, testifying to their beauty and power while alerting us to their fragility, reminding us of the importance of paying attention to place.
